8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



conceptions concerning another society, have always to be taken with 

 the qualification that the comparisons are only partially justifiable, 

 because the compared things are only partially alike in their other 

 traits. 



An objective difficulty, even greater still, which the Social Science 

 presents, arises from the distribution of its facts in Time. Those who 

 look on a society as either supernaturally created or created by Acts 

 of Parliament, and who consequently consider successive stages of its 

 existence as having no necessary dependence on one another, will not 

 be deterred from drawing political conclusions from passing facts, by 

 a consciousness of the slow genesis of social phenomena. But those 

 who have risen to the belief that societies are gradually evolved in 

 structure and function, as in growth, will be made to hesitate ou con- 

 templating the long unfolding through which early causes work out 

 late results. 



Even true appreciation of the successive facts which an individual 

 life presents, is very generally hindered by inability to grasp the long- 

 drawn processes by which ultimate effects are produced ; as we may 

 see in the foolish mother who, yielding to her perverse child, gains the 

 immediate benefit of peace, and cannot be made to realize the evil of 

 chronic dissension which her policy will hereafter bring about. And 

 in the life of a nation, which, if of high type, lasts at least a hundred 

 individual lives, correct estimation of results is still more hindered by 

 this immense duration of the processes through which antecedents 

 bring their consequents. In. judging of political good and evil, the 

 average legislator thinks much after the manner of the mother dealing 

 with the spoiled child : if a course is productive of immediate benefit, 

 that is considered sufficient justification. Quite recently an inquiry 

 has been made into the results of an administration which had been in 

 action some five years only, with the tacit assumption that, supposing 

 the results were proved good, the administration would be justified. 



And yet to those who look into the records of the past not to revel 

 in narratives of battles or to gloat over court-scandals, but to find how 

 institutions and laws have arisen and how they have worked, there is 

 no truth more obvious than that generation after generation must pass 

 before you can see what is the outcome of an action that has been set 

 up. Take the example furnished us by our Poor-Laws. When vil- 

 leinage had passed away and serfs had no longer to be maintained by 

 their owners when, in the absence of any one to control and take care 

 of serfs, there arose an increasing class of mendicants and " sturdy 

 rogues, preferring robbery to labor " when, in Richard the Second's 

 time, authority over such was given to justices and sheriffs, out of 

 which there presently grew the binding of servants, laborers, and 

 beggars, to their respective localities when, to meet the case of 

 beggars, " impotent to serve," the people of the districts in which thev 



